August sweats

August sweats

The events

Up tonight to eat some cherries
filled a shot glass with pits
a small page with these words

a fat cat crossing the street
blameless tiger
stalking a thin man

my carpets are not nearly as fine
as his are
but my poetry's thicker

the thunder's echo delayed
uncertainty skewed
becomes catastrophe

her boxers bunch & sag
like a sad sack rice farmer
fleeing a Samurai

the last cherry done
whiff of the subliminal
seeds of one day
wetting the brandy



With the dogs

In a public place
One leans against a piss-bleached tree.
The urge to excrete is unbearable.
So society
The skinnier you are
the tighter the squeeze.



Runaway

First the shadow then the bird
away from the sun
then grounded, this unit proves
the myth of independence crude
a fleeting refusal of invitations
Mercury visible in an eclipse
in the meantime ripples through the equations
These ghosts filling out the trees
Like putty in a tooth
The wind rot and gravity etc
pinball the implicit between light and shadow



"F on, F off"

"The poor old sun in the virgin again"

The wall of prurience protects
a red raging dull boy
from a theory of combinatorial society
A government, a motive, an organ
when the organ knows one note

Old men can hear it too
in the empty room drawn tight as the sheet
but for the open window
law & viridity would not enter
those who are no longer permitted to enter

and like the boys can't imagine
a wider form of participation



Specific descent

The best of the vulgarians praised Piltdown
in hunger before the purge
to lick a false father's cranium
from the business side
late vermicelli
False teeth to compensate & ape
the ape donation
To nationalize the origin
the undraping of its appurtenances
witha little stain of coffee & vitae
over chrome
And we'll still never rein in those voices
now awake without a pot or lickable symbol
quiet in the kitchen
the chauvinist seasoning drips out
rates a thin postman
among other things lost or swallowed
a weak sister, an alligator
one day she'll no longer answer the door
a star over her intersections
guiding mine
to a really boring party
dirty brown when you follow the webbing
spidery legs stretch then stir
fastened to a made man off centre
who screamed
among the other things
stop the boats
my leading man
my bleeding son
my very own



Starless Aurora

The cord snaps. There
is your answer.
The whine of the crickets
sawing through the afternoon.
The dragon of envy captures
the virgin of fruitless conversation.
Our domains purged of fortune.
From night arises sympathy, each trunk
dangling its indifferent rope.
The wind tenses our separate branches.



Irony

The infinite universe sweats enough
to dissolve all of our ideas in a day.
Limits to self-substitution
iterate on bicycles
mine shrinks - its tubes
suck into themselves
their zeros. land mines
piled on beaches. cities
fester and wash away.
chain-linking and lasers stop
the revolution
cold at the roadblock.
rust assassinates reflection
of things nailed down
scraped to brown
oceans of dust.



Drunk dragon rodeo

Cold breath of minty smoke
choke the mower
up a bad boy
cloth torn & blowing ash
tickling the spinning blade
The signalled truce to harvest corpses
jammed.
A rabid, bushy-tailed vampire squirrel
drops shells
kids dressed as midgets
cram
the elephant
ambulance
rescue-van
A pomegranate is shot
straight up its drain pipe.
Horse radish snort
While feeding
they mate
in mid-air.



King Slice

A building transfixed by ivy
next to a 24-hour coin laundry
below a balcony garden
tended by a bending woman.
She hears the rattle at night
of $1.25 deep in my pocket.
In the manner of worms
I feel my hair growing
dirtily through me.



Soda Pop

Burning chocolate
& falling filthy water
The bum at the bus-stop
is home for the night
All week he's slumped after midnight
mornings picking his scabby legs
Always his guests wait to leave him.
It falls, pure at first
mixing with sugar
onto us after uselessly scouring
the crusted waste of pigeons.



The House is Sound and

Hell, in its idea, entertains. This
is obvious, here, in Paradise —
the elect in love with our own
dead nouns
a system of evisceration
engendered by eschange.
Here, tonight, I suck the seeds dry. There
with my first million
I'd lick the bones barren.

Thebes was a tough own for thieves
wrote Apulieus
the bandit captain who lost his arm
to the rich man's prick
while working a lock

Condoms flutter, tossed
like halos after purposeful losses
No system to this place but making it
sound alright (not too loud) &
tightly knotted (not too tight)



Castles made of salt

Thrown down one day
limply at your door
the apparent geography of roofs
retrospectively melts.
Virtue confounded by excess
an end-directed abscess
while the eyes that were always watching
wilt.

"The constant presence of terror & death"
while praising the manna of thy sweet effluence
fluent hosannahs of amours & valours
& powers evaporate. We arrive
at this one remaining structure
where we all dry up. Cut off your head
and roll it around the moat.
The body sinks, reduced to its element.
A failure of dialectics. The fat tongue floats.



Canniball

They put the teeth
into transcendental
boy on a leash
the joints stiffening
after the blood drains
leaving
"nothing but the great
taste you love"



Bachelor night

The anxiety bred by idleness
and the neighbours' voices
A summer breeze
frees this evening of its garbage and decay
Slightly smokey does for fresh
A tall dry tree
conducts electricity
The eyes are leaded pains
No one
here
to argue with or with whom to breed
with whom indeed? The decision to stay in
is made.



Real Local Calor

I rode my bicycle outward
past the catacombs of the Gardiner
& the flying-saucer pissoir.
Stripped to the waist at the edge of a swamp
on the side of a lagging river
where a mysterious meter counted kilowatt hours
above a manhole locked & spray-painted
"lost."
This was still in the city proper,
but deep in its lymph sauvage.
There were blimpy bees and feeble butterflies.
An improvised ladder was a bridge to nowhere -
an island in the air where trees and stones hummed
under high-voltage wires.
Is it mad here or there to add to Nature's song?
I was the victim of insect blindness,
and its astute & opportune exploiter.
Maxwell governed their flight and cheer
which were always
and in all ways
perpendicular.
And this summer I've often seen
how gulls will circle the soccer greens
and how bees will trouble the corpses of flowers
indifferent and numb as the tongues of flatterers …




Springs a way

brachiate shiver
a long pole
what you pull out
a burr
a singing grasshopper
at the end of summer
springs away

*

infatuated with their own
beauty
ignorant
of their digestion
time jangles
in the young couple's
pockets

*

The wasp in the sandbox
skims dunes, dodges
sticks & detritus
In the temporary hollows
of children's footsteps
this killer must
be seeking bones

*

how fast does a pigeons
heart beat?
the mark
of conditioning
significantly coupled
to pecking pattern
and homing

*

a stuffed housecat
eats god
dank in here

nostrils plucked
for the queen of the air

sleep the great pacifier
he handed it to her
but flakes of the sphere
fell away from his hands

the neighbours light slices the night
inside the apartment
the star
that polishes your teeth
clean



Fresh sweet hay

The only horses regularly present
on the streets of Toronto
eat from police troughs
Judging by the evidence
they get quality rations
A good contract for some farmer
making hay
while these useful animals
shit where?
anywhere they want to



Early morning whipping boy

between the cracked & the cracker
skinny arms slash



Bequest

Uncertain hours of an uncertain day.
Though the teeth fall out
the gears keep turning
Ideas gloam
through the hormones in the envelopes
and there are canteloupes
on seven-year-old girls.
We no longer believe in the mind or in the body.
In the event of catastrophe
with our personal identification
pass those burdens on to some others remaining.




Above, below

Above the concrete
terminals
they strap lamps to
above
your blowing hair
you look down & check yourself
above the 30th floor
the comb & the keeper make three
the comb stuck in tar
in the road
like a feather
where the chiliast likes it hot
summer
crushed the insects
like so much stained glass
ants
biting the ankles of
the thing
you love



Spring lamb, summer sausages

Endless, useless memory
Our golden Victorian sculler
bronzed
imperial perps personate his rectitude
still & tall & flaccid
the sea drips, the sand scratches, the
oars get in your eyes
each one tall & silent, brown
and taut as a
wet paper bag
drifts the tide
a skin
too tight to slip out of




The play

Brick the buildings by the park
where dogs played with their lives
& children learned the purple of sweet clover
Sand and memory, a smudgy rainbow
of discoveries in the covered passages
& gravel spread for landing, the mud
showed through where others stood
tall returned from the peak of a steel pipe
A church across the street. Some willows held their poses
Confections of a event
Bricks and slime
plastering over
the stone that stung my hand
inside
the true maroon
of her velvet dress



Real deed

guns and wonder
criscross to danger
in the cloud chamber
vermicelli lick the grout
the epiphany
of the ingrown ear
attuned
to the death of a known forger
sex and video games
duly dilate
in waves sent over the border
they propagate
the dance
of avoidance
while the real dead estate
hangs out on the property
and blooms prosperously
there is no object to
origins
after all



Passing lizard show

I said I wanted her to pretend
even if it was true
because when you
pretend a thing
you can't prevent it showing

there are many trivial examples in
the papers

for example
we could pretend
that the toxins in the Athabasca river
are a natural elaboration
rather than a human
development
but the water will still kill you
and I've never been to Alberta

we could also pretend
that the man who slurs his speech on the bus
is a drunk
and not brain-damaged from a car crash 25 years ago
but on either line
he's left by the side of the road
where
he
won't bother
us
and I rarely ride the bus

similarly
we could pretend that
Gary McCullough, 53
schizophrenic hermit from the country
unpopular with his neighbours
stocky, a little paranoid
came to Toronto
with his crossbow
chainsaw
sledgehammer
arrows
baseball bat
and several water and gasoline canisters
locked in a conspicuous
home-made wood-and-metal roof-box
atop his silver Hyundai Elantra
with a
dangerous purpose
and for merely being so accoutred
and curious
in this furious city
(during the G20)
we could believe, still pretending
that he should be held without bail
as he truly still is after two months
and a beating
in jail

and yesterday another guy just like him

shot

anyway
she started to pretend to be a salamander
I didn't think it was true
but I liked how she looked around
anywhere but at me
her tongue shooting out
like a bolt
as we squirmed
friendlessly

"He's suspicious of everybody else
and just doesn't want to be bothered by anybody"

well
who
does?

outrageous
and in our cages
we eat

pretend it's air
ergo
we must be hungry



Hot meal

The hottest hour of the day
By the side window
the mold on the dried flowers
dries
the air-conditioner is off
the window here blocked
the others at equilibrium
cut off
the soft brown top of a plum
for the worms
who will come



Not really

in the skunky swamp of the park
as I look backwards at
the girl on the bicycle
then forwards as she passes
me, a lady bug crawls
across my crotch. It seems
unseemly
that this should happen in front of
the statue of the greatest Ukrainian poetess
but it does. Then two
young women in sundresses
speaking slavically pass
pretilly as I suck on a ripe plum.
I collect my thoughts on a bench
in front of the bald, bare-chested
tennis men
one is Putin to the vodka and "t", I
pretend he's watching me
as we try to identify
the trees. Their
breasts and bigger bellies bounce
with their balls, I guess.
Somewhere else
kids cry and whine
as their parents
ignore them. I'm
going home
back to all that
but I'm not
rushing



Cryo-why

Quiet unrest the autumn brings
an old lady in a sunhat unsteadily approaching
to cut your hair
& freckle your skin
like bananas ripen
in a special way
then put you in the freezer
someday, maybe
make
you a
cake



Imp it

"it's the last day of august
good morning"
sneers the radio
blame the sin, not the sinner
blame the shooter, not the long
rifled
gun
for once she's up early
almost with the sun
already making it too hot to leave the house
for this organ donor
still abed in
this beautiful, cool
stifling
apartment
too far from any place interesting
if there are any interesting places
where the organs aren't slowly poisoned
or cooked
like fried
liver
even here
it would be nice to help someone somehow
I have not discussed this hope
with my family
but her signature
has witnessed my rope-a-dope scrawl
alive
nervous
and impure
some of our organs
were
assuredly beautiful